Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (13 page)

One form of work that was closely supervised was
apprenticeship. Colonial authorities in some areas followed the practice
familiar in Spain of rounding up young vagrants or poor, homeless youth and
orphans and placing them in apprenticeships. By the end of the 18th century in
Lima, police were instructed to take the children of beggars away from their
parents if they were over five and place them as apprentices with a local
artisan. Forced apprenticeship was not reserved for any particular racial
group. Male children and young men of African descent, non-elite whites, and
Indians all went off to work as apprentices. While elite young men got an
education, these young men got vocational training. Most apprentices entered
their contracts around the age of 15, although they might be as young as 8 or
as old as 25. They were not paid a wage but received training and housing. The
artisan or boss took over the role of the parent, meeting the young person’s
needs for housing, food, and clothing in exchange for the apprentice’s work in
his shop. If the apprentice ran away, he would be sought, probably captured,
and returned to his master. Children from higher social groups, whether the
Spanish and Portuguese overlords or the indigenous noble families, were
educated longer, not put to work early like their social inferiors.

Youth and the Law

Some young people became entangled with the law, leaving a
substantial body of court cases containing many details of young people’s
lives. Children younger than 10
¹
/z were not legally considered
criminally responsible for their actions; those aged 10
¹
/z to 17
could be charged with a criminal offense but received sentences lighter than
those meted out to adults. Once over 17, people were treated in court like
adults, but they still had the right to legal counsel assigned by the court.
Quite a number of crimes seem to have been committed by young people. In Lima,
nearly one-third of all those arrested for criminal acts from the early 18th to
the early 19th century were under age 25, with male
castas
by far the
most likely to face charges. Among females, the castas were the group most
likely to be arrested, and female castas represented about one-third the number
of male castas arrested. The second largest group of arrestees was white (
español
)
males, whose numbers reached about two-thirds of the number of casta males
arrested. Male and female castas together amount to slightly more than 50
percent of all youths arrested in Lima during this 100-year period. In addition
to those who faced charges, many other young people appeared in court as
witnesses or victims.

Boys and young men who were arrested sometimes waited a
month or more in a dark, dank cell for their turn to face the court and offer
their defense. Alternatively, suspected offenders might be forced into
apprenticeships without being formally charged, much less convicted, of any
crime. The main goal of the justice system with regard to young people of the
lower social groups was not to punish them, but to track them into employment.
Parents sometimes turned their children in to the authorities to be locked up
for disobedience, after which they were usually apprenticed or assigned to a
workshop.

The sentences applied corresponded to the delinquent’s
position in the class/caste hierarchy. It was common for the court to show
leniency in the case of white youths, sometimes finding apprenticeships for the
convicted, while applying harsher sentences to racially mixed youths who might
not even have been convicted, for instance sending them into permanent exile
from their communities. This pattern of sentencing reflected the social
position of the accused and strengthened the colonial social structure. In the
case of enslaved minors, the law viewed the slaveholder rather than the
judicial system as the proper judge of appropriate punishment, since legally
this young person was the property of his owner.

Like every other colonial institution, the courts applied
the law differentially in ways that reinforced social hierarchies. Culpability
and sentencing of a white male looked very different from the court’s treatment
of a casta female, for instance, always with the goals of protecting property
and producing a productive male labor force and modest, obedient girls who
would become good Christian mothers raising docile, diligent workers.

FORMAL EDUCATION

As with the other aspects of childhood experience discussed
above, access to formal education in the European tradition varied widely by
social status. Most residents of colonial Latin America were illiterate, unable
even to sign their own names on legal documents. Those possessing the basic
elements of literacy, let alone any form of higher education, were
disproportionately Iberian in origin and reasonably prosperous in their
economic circumstances. Individuals pursuing a career in the church, the
professions, or the colonial bureaucracy were the most likely to have an
advanced formal education. In Spanish America, a university degree could be
obtained as of the 1570s in Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Lima, home to the
three oldest universities in the Americas, and in several other cities such as
Santiago de Guatemala by the end of the 17th century. During the 16th century,
zealous members of missionizing Catholic religious orders, described more fully
in the chapter on religion and popular culture, even sought briefly to make
European-style higher education a rite of passage under Spanish rule for the
sons of the indigenous nobility, particularly in Mexico. The Portuguese, on the
other hand, established no universities at all in Brazil during the entire
colonial era. Instead, residents of Brazil who desired a university education
were forced to travel to Portugal to study at the University of Coimbra.

Practical Education

While a small if influential number of colonial Latin
Americans acquired a university education that was roughly equivalent to the
one offered in the institutions of the Iberian Peninsula, the vast majority of
colonial Latin Americans had a few years of primary schooling at best, or none
at all. An apprenticeship in a trade, which carried with it the possibility of
a life that was socially and economically better than the average to be
expected among the poor masses, represented the most important learning
opportunity for the vast majority of boys in colonial society. Although
apprenticeship provided no guarantee of economic prosperity, and as noted earlier
was often used as a form of discipline for wayward youths, many parents of
modest circumstances signed contracts engaging their sons for a number of years
to master artisans in the hope that the skills acquired would allow them to
move into the ranks of skilled tradespeople, and thus into the guilds that
protected the rights and privileges of artisans. By the 17th century, the
descendants of native peoples and Africans were increasingly entering skilled
trades that were technically reserved for Iberians, as shortages of the latter
and the disdain many of them felt for a life of manual labor in the Americas
opened up spaces for castas and other non-Iberians to escape the status and
experience of the unskilled laborer. Apprenticeship, therefore, was the most
important potential source for poor children of the social mobility that would
later come to be associated with access to a good public education.

Indigenous Peoples and Formal Schooling

Despite the greater practical significance in most cases of
the education provided by an apprenticeship or training in household tasks,
formal schooling was not entirely absent from the lives of the common people in
colonial Latin America. While high levels of illiteracy reveal that it was not
a very prominent feature of daily life for most people during the colonial era,
both church and crown —at least in Spanish America—sought to promote
Christianization as well as Hispanicization by means of a few years of
primary-level schooling for indigenous children in colonial society. By the end
of the 16th century, indigenous children in New Spain were expected to attend
parish schools from ages 7 to 11, where they were to be taught the rudiments of
the Spanish language, writing, and the tenets of the Catholic faith. A
mid-17th-century recommendation by the bishop of Puebla for the establishment
of sex-segregated schools, with male teachers for boys and female teachers for
girls, indicates that the cleric took as a given the existence of some form of
universal, basic education for all children. In 1716, the viceroy in Mexico
City decreed as official policy the operation of separate schools for boys and
girls, and he also mandated that
maestros
(teachers) be knowledgeable in
Spanish, a clause obviously targeted at schools with indigenous pupils. The
notion that girls should be educated as well as boys emerges yet again in a
1762 order by a Mexican archbishop that only women of good character should be
teaching female students.

Despite these indications of official concern for the
establishment of a basic level of mass formal education for both girls and
boys, the evidence suggests that implementation was sporadic at best. For one
thing, many members of the native population resisted an educational policy
that threatened to undermine their children’s fidelity to the language and
customary practices of parents and grandparents, not to mention the detrimental
impact of mandatory school attendance on the availability of hands to support
families that were in most cases desperately poor. The indigenous residents of
rural villages rarely campaigned for the establishment of schools in their
communities; such institutions were instead usually founded on orders from
clerical or royal officials. At the same time, most of the Spanish population
was less than enthusiastic about ensuring that indigenous children had any sort
of formal education at all, while parish priests were primarily concerned with
inculcating the basics of Catholic doctrine as opposed to knowledge of the
Spanish language or rudimentary literacy, which in theory were to accompany
religious indoctrination.

The Mexican viceroy’s 1716 decree ordering teachers to have
knowledge of Spanish illustrates clearly the gap between education policy and
practice. In those rural communities where the mandated parish schools actually
operated, if often only intermittently, there were many indigenous teachers who
gave instruction in their native tongue rather than Spanish. Although the
authorities actively encouraged the employment of such teachers on the
presumption that they would be more acceptable to local residents than Spanish
outsiders, the intent behind the policy was to have trusted individuals
facilitate the adoption of Spanish norms, not undermine them. Thus, the use by
native teachers of their mother tongues in the classroom can be interpreted as
one aspect of a larger pattern of cultural resistance on the part of the
indigenous population.

Nevertheless, the employment of teachers who did not
provide education in the Spanish language also resulted from the low status
accorded to the post of schoolmaster as well as the fact that most indigenous
teachers, themselves poorly educated, were underqualified for their occupation
as defined by official policy. In many communities, the village teacher was
chosen by and owed allegiance to the local priest, who was often the most powerful
local representative of colonial authority and far more likely than the teacher
to be Spanish in origin and economically secure in family background. The
status differential can be seen in pay distinctions between the two positions.
In the mid-18th century, the annual salary of the average rural teacher in
Mexico was roughly one-tenth the amount considered to be the minimum on which a
rural priest could survive.

In the late-colonial era, reform-minded administrators
intensified efforts to translate policies regarding the establishment of some
form of universal primary education into daily practice. According to the
archbishop of Mexico, in 1754 alone some 228 parish schools were established
for Indian pupils in the territory under his jurisdiction. During the
succeeding decades, parish priests were increasingly likely to list the
establishment and support of such schools among their notable career
accomplishments. Royal officials, meanwhile, sought to make teachers more
independent of church control and presumably more effective at imparting
nonreligious academic content to their charges by ordering that teachers be
appointed by district governors instead of priests.

If anything, though, the indigenous population’s resistance
to formal schooling increased as late-colonial efforts to impose it on a more
systematic and “enlightened” basis gathered steam. The residents of native
villages complained especially about the funding burden they were forced to
bear to support local schools and often delayed teachers’ salaries or refused
outright to pay them. At bottom, formal schooling continued to be seen in many
indigenous communities as a means by which alien cultural norms were to be
imposed on them as well as an inconvenient distraction from vital family labor.
In 1791, the royal official in charge of the Mexican region of Guadalajara
complained that “during the growing season, the Indians take their children out
of school for the entire rainy season until the crop is harvested.”  And
numerous officials observed that villagers who obtained any significant degree
of formal schooling continued to be mistrusted more than admired by their
neighbors.